First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
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In this episode, Mitzi talks to Madeleine Thien about her new novel, The Book of Records.
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Mitzi Rapkin: The Book of Records’ main character, Lina is living in a city made of time and she meets three historical figures: Hannah Arendt, Baruch Spinoza, and Du Fu. It seems like such an impossible feat to put these three historical figures into a novel that has movement and that can engage the reader, because it’s very challenging, I think, to ask the reader to move between these worlds, but also time, and while your novel is not in any way a history lesson, but if you don’t know anything about these characters, you do learn a lot. And it sounds like you did take these liberties with the characters. Was that of concern for you of how to pull this off?
Madeleine Thien: Oh my gosh, terrifying. It felt like such transgression. It’s hard to know what drives you through a project. There’s something you can’t let go of or something, or something is asking something of you, and you want to see it through. But also, you know that through this work, you’re thinking through something that is going to help you live your life. That’s how it felt to me, and not just to live my life, but how to live in this world. You know, Hannah has this line that’s always stayed with me from the beginning, which is, why is it so hard to love this world? This idea of love of this world is so important to her because she kind of insists on it, even when she sees the worst of the worst, even when she’s writing about totalitarianism, even when she’s thinking about all the friends she loses. At some point, she says, my life and the life of my friends were treated like so much trash. But she insists, and I think this is maybe why I’ve always felt this gratitude to her, even if I don’t agree with everything she ever writes or says, I feel this gratitude that she asks this difficult question and insists on this love for the world because it’s our only home. It’s both our only home and our temporary home. And she talks a lot about beginnings, that we come into this world not to die, but to begin. And that gives me a lot of – it’s more than solace, it’s more than courage – it’s a companionship, you know, as we face each day. So, in a way, even when the novel really wasn’t working, and I would say, for seven years it really didn’t work. It was the first time I ever felt that I would probably work on something for eight years and probably throw it in the garbage. But one day, it just turned a corner. And I do think that something about writing and me and my relationship with it is it teaches me to be persistent. It teaches me not to give up. It teaches me to believe that there is a connective tissue somewhere, and maybe it will take a long time to find it, but it’s there to be found, and that one has to be patient. I really love writing. I can’t even quite put my finger on it and I love the form of the novel. I love that it has this generosity and that they’re unique creations, living things that don’t work for everyone, that’s okay, but sometimes you find something in them that helps you, helps you choose what you want to be in this world and what you want this world to be.
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Madeleine Thien is the author of four books, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Montreal. Her new novel is The Book of Records.